Too Late
by Tez
Summary: How late is too late? [GSR, angst]
1. Chapter 1

Summary: Hell is truth seen too late. GSR, Angst

Disclaimer: CSI does not belong to me. If it did, every single episode would involve Nick and/or Warrick needing to dive in and retrieve a crucial piece of evidence from the bottom of a swimming pool.

A/N: I'm not sure where this came from. I'm _supposed _to be a Snicker. I just couldn't shake the plot bunny. Also, I've tossed the CSI timeline out the window. As far as I'm concerned, _Play With Fire_ happened around New Year's. I know I'm wrong, but having it take place in May is inconvenient for me because I wrote the story before I bothered to check the date on the episode, so I changed the date, all May-December Sara-Grissom joking aside. Take that, TPTB.

Spoilers: _Play With Fire_, disregarding the canon CSI timeline.

"Hell is truth seen too late."

- Thomas Hobbes

"When you finally figure it out, you might be too late."

- Sara Sidle, to Gil Grissom

* * *

It took two bullets for Gil Grissom to realize he was in love with Sara Sidle. 

Twelve bullets were actually fired: the entire contents of the still-unidentified shooter's clip. Twelve .38-caliber 100-grain truncated-cone bevel-based bullets. Three of them hit their intended target, the also-still-unidentified man who'd been crossing the street to avoid the crime scene tape spanning the sidewalk. Six of them lodged in the brick wall of the house that contained the crime scene he and Sara were investigating. One of them hit the ground, leaving a furrow in the formerly well-manicured lawn. The remaining two shattered the house's plate-glass window and hit Sara squarely in the chest, slamming her to the floor and changing Grissom's life forever.

He shook the bullets out of the envelope marked evidence and onto the palm of his hand. The dull metal appeared so innocuous against the pale white of his latex glove, and he marveled at the vagarious nature of life. He'd never seen it coming. Neither of them had.

* * *

_**Two Days Eariler**_

Sara pulled off her amber-hued filter glasses, annoyed.

"There's no spatter on the wall," she announced. Grissom glanced up from his dusting, and the look of vague disbelief on his face increased her annoyance tenfold. "Come and look for yourself, then."

Her snide tone wasn't lost on him, but he chose to ignore it, joining her and taking the proffered glasses. She pointed the ALS at the wall again, flexing her fingers to ward off the chill in the air as he checked for the elusive blood spatter. She'd been glad to get an indoor assignment tonight, since the temperature was nearing freezing outside, but when they'd arrived Brass had given them the unwelcome news that the victim's heater was broken. It was nearly as cold inside as it was outside. She'd kept her coat on, and she was beginning to wish she'd kept her hat and scarf on, too.

Grissom was still looking at the wall. She sighed in exasperation, not caring if he heard her, and turned to glance out the picture window on her left. Out on the lawn, Brass was giving instructions to a uniformed officer. As she watched, a county-issue vehicle pulled up to the curb and Warrick stepped out.

She wouldn't admit it out loud, but she was relieved he was there. Grissom had been unbearable to work with over the past few weeks, double-checking and second-guessing her at every opportunity. She was the only member of the night shift he was treating like a rookie on her first assignment. _You're also the only one who made a pass at him,_ the little voice in her head reminded her, and she suppressed a sigh. Regardless of what she'd done on a personal level, there was no reason for him to act like she was an idiot professionally. He tended to lighten up on her when the others were around, so Warrick's presence might mean she could stop trying to prove that she knew how to do her job and start actually doing it.

A muted 'bang' from outside caught her attention and she rolled her eyes, wondering why so many people felt the need to continue their New Year's celebrations into mid-January. She'd nearly called 911 two nights ago in a fit of panic before realizing that the little explosions outside her apartment weren't gunshots, but her next-door neighbor's illegal firecrackers. She'd still been tempted to call the police, but if she'd waited for them to send a squad car, she would've been late for her shift.

The 'bang' was followed by another, and another, and another. She frowned when she saw Warrick duck out of sight behind his SUV, the cops around him drawing their guns and crouching to make themselves smaller targets. When she turned to look at Grissom, she saw her own dawning realization mirrored in his eyes. She'd been wrong to assume the noise was gunshots two nights ago, but this time, she was right.

"Someone's shooting –" she began to tell him, but before she could finish her sentence or move away from the window, there was the sound of breaking glass and something hard and heavy hit her in the chest. Twice.

The ALS slipped out of her hand, unnoticed, as the force of the combined impacts knocked her off her feet. Grissom watched, too stunned to react, as the scene seemed to play out in slow motion.

He'd heard the old adage about people's lives flashing before their eyes when they were about to die. He didn't know whether it was true for Sara, but in the half an instant between the window shattering and Sara hitting the floor, her life flashed before Gil Grissom's eyes. The parts of it he'd been around for, anyway.

_Sara as a college coed, the insatiably curious wide-eyed ingénue who'd attended his guest lectures and asked more intelligent questions than he'd ever heard, even from his fellow forensic scientists. Sara showing him around San Francisco, her curly hair dancing in the bay breeze, pointing out all of the historical landmarks and never noticing that he was too busy admiring her to admire them. Sara in the lab and Sara in interrogation rooms and Sara at crime scenes, always with the same unconscious air about her, the unique combination of intelligence and curiosity and passion that was the very essence of Sara Sidle. _

Beautiful, wonderful, brilliant Sara, who had stirred depths of emotion in him that he hadn't known he was capable of feeling. Admiration, envy, affection, consternation, reverence, passion, sympathy, awe – he'd known what they were, in an abstract sort of way, but he'd never really experienced them until he'd felt them about her.

And now she was lying on the floor, unnaturally still, shards of broken glass from the window shimmering in her hair and on her coat and on the expensive cherry-wood floor around her, blood starting to stream from a cut on her cheek where jagged glass had met bare skin, and he _knew_. As he dropped to his knees beside her, his fingers clumsy as they fumbled with the buttons of her coat, his eyes stinging with unshed tears when he saw the two neat holes in the thick gray fabric, he _knew_. He'd finally figured it out.

He loved her.

Gil Grissom loved Sara Sidle.

And it was too late.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: CSI still isn't mine.

A/N: GSR still isn't my ship. This is my first cruise on the SS Geek Love.

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."  
- George Eliot

* * *

Sara blinked once, twice, and the world came back into focus. She was looking at the ceiling. Not her ceiling, or the ceiling at the lab. _The crime scene_, she recalled, frowning. She hadn't bothered to look up at the ceiling earlier. There were little rust-brown stains on the white stucco. _The missing blood spatter_, she realized, pleased with herself, and turned her head to tell Grissom. She was rewarded with a sharp shock of pain and the terrible sight of Grissom crying. She'd never seen him cry before. His hands, she realized with no small amount of surprise, were on her body, tugging at her thick gray peacoat.

"Sara," he whispered, his eyes meeting hers, and the pain in her chest doubled at the agony she saw there. "I'm so sorry."

He'd never apologized before. She wondered what he'd done this time, even as she knew that no matter what it was, she'd forgive him. She always forgave him.

"It's okay, Gris."

He choked on a sob at her words, still fumbling with the buttons on her coat, still cursing himself for not realizing how much she meant to him before she was lying on the floor at a crime scene with two bullets in her chest.

"I'm sorry, Sara," he breathed, finally managing to open up her coat and steeling himself for the sight of blood staining her light blue shirt. "God, I'm sorry, I'm sorry –"

He froze. Instead of the shirt he'd been surreptitiously admiring before the start of shift in the break room – it flattered her curves to the point that he'd been almost glad it'd been so cold at their crime scene, so she'd wear her coat and he wouldn't be distracted by the urge to ogle her and miss some important piece of evidence – he was confronted with a solid column of black. Over the all-too-well-fitting shirt, she was wearing her CSI vest. Her _bulletproof_ CSI vest.

"It's okay," she repeated, following his gaze down to the two dime-sized metal circles now embedded in the vest: the bevel-base remnants of the bullets. The sight triggered the memory she'd momentarily misplaced when her head connected with the hardwood floor.

_She'd started to tell Grissom there was a shooter outside, and then something had hit her, knocking the air out of her lungs and her body to the floor. Shooter. Bullets. The breaking window…and pain._

She sucked in a deep breath and instantly regretted it, her ribs protesting violently. The vest had stopped the bullets, but her body had absorbed their momentum. The laws of physics could be a bitch sometimes.

"Sara?" Grissom demanded, his voice tight with fear, and she knew he'd seen her wince.

"I think I cracked a rib," she told him, careful to keep her breathing shallow. "Maybe more than one. It's hard to breathe."

Grissom's hands moved to the velcro straps of the vest, pulling them apart and gently coaxing the heavy Kevlar off of her body, relieving the weight that was constricting her chest. As he set aside the unwieldy vest, the front door slammed open. Keenly aware of how vulnerable Sara was, Grissom had his gun drawn and pointed at the newcomer before he realized who it was. If he hadn't been so worried about Sara, he might have taken a moment to be amused that, in his twenty-year CSI career, the second person on whom he'd ever drawn his firearm was Jim Brass.

"Hey, are you two – Jesus." Brass cut himself off, taking in the tableau before him. Sara Sidle was lying on the floor, her body sprawled awkwardly on the dark wooden planks. Grissom was kneeling next to her with a horrified expression on his face and his gun pointed directly at Brass. "Sara –"

"I'm okay," she said again, noticing that the words were becoming more of a lie as the adrenaline started to wear off and she became hyperaware of the pain in her chest. "I was wearing my vest."

"She's not okay," Grissom contradicted sharply. "She was _shot_."

In response, Brass pulled out his radio. "This is Captain Brass. I need you to rush a bus to 873 Weston Road in Summerlin. We've got an officer down. Repeat, 422, officer down."

"I'm not 'down'," Sara muttered as Brass knelt by her other side. He snorted, darkly amused by her protest.

"You look 'down' from here," he informed her, reaching for the hem of her shirt and pulling it unceremoniously up, exposing her torso to see the injuries she'd suffered.

Grissom stared wordlessly at the expanse of pale flesh, marred by two quickly-darkening bruises where her chest had absorbed the bullets' momentum. One of them sat on the inner curve of her ribcage on her right side, and the other was higher, starting about an inch below her left breast and disappearing under her kilted-up shirt. Brass probed the bruises with gentle fingers to the limit that propriety would allow, checking for spongy areas that might indicate broken ribs. When Sara winced, Grissom felt his own chest twinge in sympathy.

"How bad is it?" Sara asked, afraid to hear the answer, and Brass gave her a reassuring smile.

"Maybe a few hairline fractures, but I don't think it's serious."

"You don't think it's _serious_?" Grissom repeated, his voice sounding strangled even to his own ears. Sara frowned at him, puzzled, but one look at the other man told Brass exactly why he was so upset. Grissom had finally gotten the wake-up call he'd needed where his feelings for Sara were concerned. It was a pity that it had to come in the form of her being shot, but at least it looked like Sara would be all right.

"Regardless of how serious I think it is, she's going to stay perfectly still until she's been x-rayed at the hospital," Brass reassured Grissom. Sara looked as though she might protest, and Brass shook his head at her, giving her a conspiratorial wink. "If you've got a broken rib and you manage to puncture a lung with it, I'm gonna be filling out paperwork on this until I retire. So do a guy a favor and just play along, huh, Sweetheart?"

"Sure."

There were more footsteps in the doorway. Brass turned away to deal with the newcomers, and in the heated discussion that followed, Grissom recognized Warrick's voice. Brass was apparently refusing everyone entry, keeping them from contaminating the crime scene any further than the unidentified shooter already had.

Sara ignored the commotion and the side conversations, focusing on the fact that Grissom was still holding her hand.

"Gris?" she said softly, and when his eyes met hers, she wondered at the emotional turmoil she could see there. "You okay?"

He shook his head in disbelief, squeezing her fingers. That was typical Sara, concerned for everyone but herself. "Don't worry about me, Honey. Just keep breathing. Try not to move."

_Honey_, she thought to herself, resisting the urge to let a dreamy smile cross her face. _I love it when he calls me that._ For now, she let herself forget the fact that he'd only done it twice, and both times she'd been injured and in need of medical attention.

The sound of glass crunching under shoes gave them early warning that someone was approaching them. Grissom looked away from Sara reluctantly to find that Warrick had gotten past Brass and was headed their way. Grissom gave him a curt nod, and both men turned their attention to Sara.

"Hey, girl," Warrick greeted her, and the false cheeriness of his voice made Sara cringe.

"Hey," she replied as he came into her field of vision, kneeling down in the spot Brass had vacated. "Hope you're wearing your vest. Tough crowd out here tonight."

Warrick grinned, and this smile had a little more honesty to it. "I guess the bullet missed your sense of humor, huh?" he teased. Grissom's expression turned thunderous, but Sara's hand tightened on his and he realized that gallows humor, however offensive he might find it, was a needed release mechanism for the two younger CSIs.

They traded quips for another few minutes, Warrick keeping Sara's mind off the pain while Grissom watched the steady rise and fall of her chest. Her breathing was still fast and shallow, but she wasn't gasping or struggling for air, and the pain wasn't bad enough to keep her from talking. Slowly, he allowed himself to hope that she might really be all right, but with that hope came fear of a totally different kind. He'd been so afraid that he'd lose her that he hadn't considered what he'd do if she survived. How could he tell her he loved her after what he'd put her through? Two weeks ago she'd asked him to dinner and 'to see what happened'. She'd laid all of her proverbial cards on the table and he'd folded without hesitation. How could he convince her now that he did want to see what happened, that he loved her and wanted her and needed her? What reason would she have to believe him?

"Hey, the paramedics are here," Warrick said, distracting Grissom from his thoughts. Sure enough, two men in the standard medic uniform were entering the room under Brass's watchful eye, carrying their kits and rolling a stretcher between them.

"Anybody we know?" Sara asked Warrick, but he wasn't the one who answered.

"Sara?" The voice was familiar, and she closed her eyes, suddenly weary. Of all the paramedics in Vegas, her cheating ex had to be the one they called out when she was injured. "God, Sara, what _happened_?"

"She was shot, that's what happened!" Warrick snapped, narrowing his eyes at the other man. Sara had refused to talk to him about her breakup with Hank, but Catherine hadn't been nearly so tight-lipped, so he knew Hank had been two-timing Sara. "Stop asking stupid questions and get over here and do your damn job!"

Grissom was confused by Warrick's unusual show of temper until he finally recognized the paramedic who came over to take Sara's pulse. He'd only met Hank once, but Catherine had constantly reminded Grissom of the man's relationship with Sara, trying to spur him into admitting his feelings. It had the opposite effect; Grissom had tried to be happy that Sara had found someone who wasn't afraid to love her, and he'd withdrawn even further. Catherine's revelation that they'd broken up after the other man cheated on Sara had left him even more unsure of how to proceed with her.

"She's stable," the still-nameless other paramedic declared, and Hank nodded his agreement.

"We're going to shift you over to the stretcher. It might hurt a little," Hank told Sara, who responded with an eye-roll that spoke more eloquently than words could have. He cradled her head with one hand and lifted her torso with the other. With his partner lifting her legs, they shifted her as gently as possible over to the stretcher.

Despite her best efforts, she couldn't hold back a whimper as the two paramedics moved her, jostling her ribs in the process. She clenched her eyes shut, trying to block out the pain. It was quickly forgotten as Grissom brought her hand to his lips, pressing a chaste kiss to her palm.

"Hang in there, Honey," he murmured, sounding as though he was in as much pain as she was. "You're doing great."

Behind them, Warrick and Brass exchanged a look, Warrick's puzzled and Brass's amused. Warrick's eyebrows shot up toward his hairline. He'd known about Sara's crush on Grissom – _everyone _knew about Sara's crush on Grissom – but he'd had no idea that their boss returned her feelings.

"Sara?" Hank said softly, and Grissom frowned at him. Hank held up his hand in response – the hand that had guided the back of Sara's head onto the stretcher. The fingers of his latex glove were smeared with blood. "Did you hit your head when you fell?"

Grissom looked down at the floor where Sara's head had been, and his heart seized when he saw a small pool of blood. They'd been so careful not to move her, and she hadn't complained about her head hurting, so they'd assumed…

_You know what they say about people who assume_, the little voice in his head reminded him snidely, and he clenched his jaw. He should have known better. He should have checked.

"I…think I did," Sara said slowly, opening her eyes again, and Hank counted the seconds between when her eyes opened and when her pupils constricted to accommodate the bright lighting in the room. _Concussion_, he concluded. It couldn't be too severe, though, or she'd be complaining about the pain. Not that he'd ever heard Sara Sidle complain about anything. Even when she'd found out he was using her to cheat on Elaine, she'd merely smiled weakly and told him she'd see him around. Unfortunately, 'around' happened to involve her getting injured at a crime scene. Of the two of them, he knew she wasn't the one who deserved it.

"Did you black out?"

"Maybe. For a second."

"It couldn't have been any longer than that," Grissom added, giving her hand another squeeze. "She was awake and talking to me by the time I got to her."

Hank nodded. There wasn't nearly enough blood for it to be a substantial head wound, but it still needed to be checked out. He'd done Sara wrong once; this time, he'd make sure he did right by her. He owed her that much.

"Let's get her to the hospital."

When it became apparent to Warrick that his boss had no intention of letting go of Sara's hand, he cleared his throat.

"You want me to call Catherine?" he offered, and Grissom nodded after a moment's hesitation, obviously having forgotten the rest of the world even existed.

"I want everyone on this shooting," Grissom replied over his shoulder, still walking next to the stretcher, still holding Sara's hand. "Nobody works any other cases tonight. And anybody who shows up without a vest on is fired."


End file.
